Carbon Landscape Poet in Residence: Clare Shaw
Manchester Literature Festival and Lancashire Wildlife Trust (LWT) are delighted to announce the appointment of Clare Shaw as Poet in Residence as part of the Carbon Landscape Partnership funded by National Heritage Lottery Fund (NHLF). Clare will be spending time in some of the green spaces connected to LWT over summer 2021 and will produce a sequence of poems responding to her interaction with the landscape and other visitors to the area, exploring themes of well-being, environment, climate emergency and post-industrial landscape.
Watch this space for further details of how you can engage with the project and watch and listen to Clare’s specially commissioned poems later in the year.
Clare Shaw was born and raised in Burnley in East Lancashire and now lives just over the moors near Hebden Bridge. She has three poetry collections with Bloodaxe – Straight Ahead, Head On and Flood. Her fourth collection Towards a General Theory of Love was awarded a Northern Writer’s Award and will be published by Bloodaxe in 2022. In 2021, Clare presented and co-wrote Ways to Weather the Storm on Radio Four; examining how creativity and art helped Hebden Bridge community to live with the impact of repeated flooding. Clare is currently working with the Royal Academy of Music, writing the libretto for an opera which will tour the UK in 2022. She is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and co-director of the Kendal Poetry Festival.
About Lancashire Wildlife Trust
Our vision is to create a region rich in wildlife for all to enjoy, keeping nature at the heart of everything we do. We are your local charity, working hard to improve your local area for wildlife and for you. Since 1912, The Wildlife Trusts have been speaking out for nature in the UK. Our organisation is unique – while most of our work for wildlife takes place at local grassroots level, we have a national voice. Find out more at www.lancswt.org.uk
About the Carbon Landscape Partnership
The Carbon Landscape Partnership is an NHLF funded project led by Lancashire Wildlife Trust, celebrating the Wigan, Salford and Warrington communities. The Carbon Landscape boasts a huge variety of habitats, from lowland raised bogs, wet meadows, mire and fen to semi-natural broad-leaved woodland that, together, could form a vital green 'motorway'. These habitats provide homes for a rich diversity of specialist wildlife, much of which is reliant on well-connected habitats in order to thrive.
Its aim is to redesign our landscape with wildlife in mind. The Carbon Landscape Partnership aims to restore more than 130 hectares to nature, involve local people in the restoration work, train more than 1000 volunteers and offer free education to 40 schools, and is spearheading the latest Government thinking on the environment. Find out more at www.carbonlandscape.org.uk
